Waking Up Screaming

"I’ll start with H.P. Lovecraft , who thinks reality itself is completely nuts, and that anyone who thinks there is a single absolute or straightforward interpretation of our reality is obviously barking mad. “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” is a story about Slater, a “white trash vagrant” who falls into this psychotic rage and murders his neighbour. When the narrator meets him in an asylum, Slater keeps having these bizarre visions of amazing things with green lights, and oceans of space and beautiful music, and mountains and valleys, and also of this blazing entity that has it in for him. Obviously the narrator thinks: how can this illiterate idiot have these extraordinary visions, where did they come from? The narrator attaches a telepathic device to Slater so that he can experience it as well, whereupon conveniently Slater dies, and this voice starts communicating to the narrator and says: I come from this world that you enter in your freedom of sleep – once you enter your dreams you lose all the trappings of your tedious reality and enter this wonderland. He says in sleep we all roam through many ages and lose all the limits of time and space. The narrator has to be regarded as having had a nervous breakdown, and Lovecraft is using dreams as a way in, to justify it all, but really every time the story takes fire and leaps at you it’s because of these descriptions of this extraordinary place. The Lovecraft stories that I really love are these ones that some people call the Dreamland Cycle (this story is often classified as one of them) about worlds that you enter through dreams. But even within these worlds, people say: don’t push too much against the boundaries of what you’re permitted to see, so there’s still that sense of prohibition. You have to be absolutely certain you can cope; so it’s always about how much disillusion of your sense of reality can you deal with in these worlds? How far can you go before you say: actually I’d quite like things to be normal? In the end we don’t like to lose our entire identity and humanity."

"This one is a bit out there. It’s set on a submarine in the First World War . It represents what I like about the sea as a setting, but does so in a scary horror way. The sea is perfect for that—all the things you don’t know about. It links to sci fi in a way, because it is a bit like spaceships on the edge of what we know. What I love about Lovecraft’s stories is the atmosphere of them, the building of that weird, unsettling aura. There’s a double dose of that in “The Temple.” You’ve got the sea as a setting, and then you’ve got a submarine as well. They’re completely trapped in it and it’s very claustrophobic. What I also like is that he’s not afraid to be weird. With some stories, people build up to a point, and then, at the end, they back away from what could be an interesting conclusion to the story or an interesting character moment, and they go a bit safer. Lovecraft sets it up and then he goes for it. This is not traditional naval fiction. It’s only a dozen or so pages. But it’s got a lot of the same themes as the sea stories and the naval fiction that I like."